Why Bitcoin Cash is Not Bitcoin

The worlds first blockchain was the Blockchain implemented by the mysterious legend Satoshi Nakamoto, a man whose identity is still not known today. The Blockchain was used as the public ledger for his Cryptocurrency – Bitcoin, otherwise known as BTC. The Bitcoin blockchain has been public since 2009, almost a decade, and even today it still holds the highest market cap. of any Cryptocurrency. In fact, more than 50% of all money held in Crypto is currently in BTC.

Over the past years, there were many discussions about how the Bitcoin blockchain would scale as it became more and more popular. BTC takes around 10 minutes for each new block, and therefore confirmation. This can be considered a little slow for payments if they require multiple confirmations. However, The main limiting factor with BTC is the maximum block size limit parameters in the code – 1MB. This allows for a maximum of approximately 250,000 transactions per day.

Bitcoin Cash – BCH

On August 1st, 2017, there was a hard fork in the Bitcoin blockchain. This hard fork was the creation of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – and anyone holding bitcoin in a wallet at the time of the fork received BCH at a 1:1 ratio. Bitcoin Cash continues in the same way as Bitcoin, but it has increased the maximum block size limiting parameters to 8MB – this allows for up to 2 million transactions a day.

Since coming into existence on August 1st, 2017, Bitcoin Cash has been a fairly successful cryptocurrency. Due to the 8MB max block size, the fees remain low(er) than typical BTC transaction fees. Since the chain is running the same as the original Bitcoin blockchain, the confirmation times remain roughly the same as BTC – approximately ten minutes.

The Confusion and The Community Ignorance

For a short while the communities who followed Bitcoin Cash and those who followed Bitcoin (often referred to as Bitcoin Core) didn’t really have too much of an issue with each other. However, this didn’t last for long. BTC implemented SegWit2x to reduce fees and Lightning Network – an off-chain solution to make transfers instantaneous. These upgrades were not part of the initial roadmap – and the BCH followers decided that in fact, BCH is following the original idea of a decentralized p2p cryptocurrency more than BTC itself.

The problem now is that the BCH community is marketing BCH as Bitcoin – not only Bitcoin Cash. Although there may be some logic in why they are doing so, they chose the name Bitcoin Cash after the fork and are now causing confusion for new investors in a time where the market is so volatile is not helping the community.

BCH also caused a massive issue after it’s listing on Coinbase – however, I will write about that in a separate article.

BCH is Not Bitcoin

Although both BTC and BCH have their advantages and disadvantages over each other – BTC was the original and remains the largest cryptocurrency in existence. There is nothing wrong with BCH as an idea, however, it needs to be made clear – especially to new investors – that BCH is not Bitcoin, it is Bitcoin Cash. If you want to invest in Bitcoin, make sure you are buying BTC.